Usefulness

Uselessness in ancient greece

- Uselessness is not devaluated

- Strong devaluation of everything linked to materiality

- Because there is no eternal truth about anything material (Parmenides)

Robert Castel

Does a historical genealogy of salary workers

- 14 th century appearance of the salary worker

- When the poor started to be deemed useless

- Work is of low value while sciences and politics are of high value

Scholia

- Skhole – you get more human every time you do schooling – it is an extension

of the time – but this is useless

- In order to do indulge in this uselessness – you need someone to do the

useful tasks for you (askholia is the actitivies for non-citizens)

Plato

Criticises the Protagoras that say there is no objective truth, rather we should

do whatever is useful for humanity (use rhetoric and seducation)

- Rather, for Plato there is a good through which a good politician can access

- Utility is not the supreme goal – can be an indicator o fhappiness – but utility

nor happiness are goals

The Romans and Utilitas Publicas

Emerged in law and administration

- Uter – to make us of/ or to be in relation with

- A way to oppose not only cupiditas (money for your own desire) of leaders

tempted to put their own interests first

- But also vanitas, a moral sin condemned in the bible

- Cicero – public utility would be an equivalent of honestum (The Good)

- To also oppose uselessness – uselessness becomes a sin – baths/games

comes to mean something about utility

Influence of Shakespeare

- Util became useful – inutilitas became useless

Context of The Prince

“If a ruler who wants always to act honorably is surrounded by many

unscrupulous men his downfall is inevitable’

- A ruler could not govern morally and be successful – distinction between

politics and morality

- Threatened Christian views of the church at the time

- Raised new issues of the relationship between religion, morality and politics

- For Machiavelli, a ruler’s virtue was a combination of qualities that enabled

him to gain and retain support – pragmatic conception of power

- Goal of stability – permanent state

- But also the prince as this abstract figure

The Reason of the State context

The Reason of the State (Context)

- Became a political bestseller in the late 16 th century 17 th centuries

- Founded on a antimachiavellian tradition – saw it as impious and irrational

- Botero born into the Italian Counter-Reformation – attempt of the Catholic

church to adapt to the changing world

- Looking at the expanding European cities – initially writes about ‘On the

Causes of the Greatness and Magnificance of Cities’

- Esteemed republics

- Frequently. Referred to the Roman and Greek traditions

- Personifies the state – Something that can be independent and autonomous

from the people participating in politics – impermanence (linked to utilitas

publicas)

- Also agrees morality is not the goal – but if you can be moral be moral

the reason of the state theory

The state could remain moral in character – and could successfully govern by

doing so

- Interested in the conservation and the expansion of the state – to preserve a

state is a greater achievement than to found one – like Machiavelli, goal is

also stability (but for peace and prosperity)

- The prince is no necessary – it is just one of the means necessary – ‘the

reason of the state’ – you should do everything you can to serve the interest

of the state

- Reason of the state is to self-preserve itself – if this is the reason – then the

state should serve the population as good as possible

- Prosperity can be achieved in two ways – war and industry

Virtue (justice and liberality) (Book 1)

Was mixed with Christian principles of virtue

- Moderate virtue could elicit the love of the people but only outstanding virtue

could could evoke reputation – both love and fear elements of reputation –

fear more important

- Also had to be genuine virtue – not just appearance but reality

- Aimed virtue most through justice and liberality – justice where the arms of the

state reached the people (taxes) – liberality like patronage of the arts

(attracting prominent personalities to the state)

Valor as a second source of virtue

Pays less time on this

- Meaning boldness or ardire

- Marvelous deeds

- Either keeping their attention or keeping them occupied – particularly the

urban poor

- The nobles were also seen as potentially dangerous (princes of the blood,

great feudal lords – with overly large offices and overly secure incumbency)

- Wary of excessive wealth

Religion as valuable

The mother of virtues – divine aid it won for the state

Consequences – changes in political philosophy

- There is a self-legitimation of the state

- A play on interest – assuming the state as a goal of prosperity – means the

foundation of politics is that we assume everyone is self-interested

- If you want to domination of people – then you have to play on the self-

interest of the population

- Transformation from the state as conforming with the bible – into interest

Thomas Hobbes

Justification of the state – all personal interest is better served in bedience

than in maximum freedom

- Writing in the context of the British Civil War

human nature

Weak but not immoral (doesn’t include normative judgements about morality)

- Law of nature - Main interest is self-preservation – other laws are derived from

this (eg. the law of grateful)

- Right of nature – the freedom to do everything you want to self-preserve

- Also sees a kind of equality between human beings – because no one is

extremely stronger than another – scarcity (Malthus) and permanent

competition

- We are rational – this is through what we can create the social contract

the social contract

While we can’t change the law of nature we can denounce the right of nature

– the freedom to do whatever we wish

- This is also in our self-interest

- But needs a third person – the guarantor – The Leviathan

theory of representation/personification

- One source of power

- The only thing that matters is what is legal – you should be physicially forced

to obey

- The right of nature is given to the state – who can use any means possible –

use the freedoms – thus can kill those that disobey its laws in extreme cases

- A continuity of the state of nature – because it is the ultimate form of self-

presevration

theory of authorisation

We are authors and the state if an actor – we as authors keep the

responsibility for our actions – we accept the consequences of every decision

that the leviathan makes for us

- The Social contract is tacitly renewed

consequences for utility

The public interest is defined in a way of the state’s interest – because of the

personification of the sate as representating everyones private interest

albert o hirschman

kant

jeremy bentham

Utility is a fact of nature – to be accessed through rational thought and

calculation (Vallelly, 24)

- The most moral action is the one that maximises the good or utility for the

most amount of people

- Via a generalised impartial view of what is good or useful

the principle of utility

Utility is property that tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure or

happiness or to prevent the happening of pain, evil etc.

- To maximise utility is to expand the conditions of pleasure concurrently with

the contradiction of the conditions that produce pain (Vallelly, 28)

- Contrasts to asceticism

- Also contrasts sympathy which is a character judgement

why is utilitarianism so wary of sanctioning cruelty

Because maximising the happiness of the greatest number of people can

justify immorality

- Thus uses the measurement of the felicific calculus – measures of intensity,

duration, certainty/uncertainty…

individual and collective experience

Pleasure and pain are initially calculated on an individual level – then this

experience can be extended towards the public sphere

- Seen as the sum of the interests of the members who compose it

- Suspicious of ‘society’ – laying the grounds for neoliberal thought.

in defense of usury

Envisages a culture of adventure and risk – where individuals should be free

to enter a market of their choosing

fetishization of money

- Because he who has money can get what else he has in his mind

- The accumulation of money is the primary measurement of an individual’s

happiness

However, utilitarianism is still aimed at a form of wellbeing that extends beyond the

individual

- But it also operates at the level of the individual

marx

Utility is an immanent concept, historically contingent and developed through

concrete social and labour relations – always evolving (Vallelly, 23)

John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick

Mill largely agreed with Bentham that the human is a pleasure-seeking animal

– but believed that the goal was increasing the quality rather than the quantitiy

of pleasures.

o Brought in moral relativism – placing higher value on bourgeois

endeavours of the intellect.

o Shaped his views on moral suffrage.

o Also viewed equality as the optimal social condition for the

maximisation of utility

- Henry Sidgwick had a major influence on the discipline of economic science –

quantitive nature of utilities – self-interest and social welfare are not mutually

exclusive

Maynard Keynes

Critical of utilitarianism as a philosophical doctrine – particularly Bentham and

the ‘calculating mentality’

- But maintained utilitarian aspects in ‘majoritarian ethics’

- Saw the individual as constitutive of its community

- Ridding individuals of their economic burden frees them to create healthy

communities

Friedrich Hayek

Critical of utilitarianism as a philosophical doctrine – particularly Bentham

- But mainatained the theory of ‘individual autonomy in a community’

- Rejects the existence of society

The New Spirit of Capitalism (Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello)

- Looking at how utility in the economic sphere was seen as an autonomous

sphere – “independent of ideology and morality, which obeys positive laws”

- “separation between morality and economics” – “based on the

calculation of utilities”

- Utilitarianism encourages the subjugation of collective interests to that of the

individual in order to reach this end goal

Futilitarianism (Neil Vallelly)

Introduction

- Futility as central to capitalism – not just a symptom f it

- Seeking constantly to be useful in a syste of precarity

- Internalises ideas of personal rationality/ competitiveness

- Keep aspect of futility is how it is masked by social ‘utility’

- Utility is constructed by both the political economy and those that construct it

– capitalists and maximising utility – means maximising productivity,

accumulation and growth

- The futilitarian condition – going into debt to gain qualifications – short term

contracts – entering into a precarious economy

- Also making personal ‘ethical’ decisions in order to feel useful in a dying

planet

- Experiences of futility are also of course distributed differently – across the

social sphere

How this reduces resistance

- The condition internalises capitalism’s rationalities

- Also maximises debt – a prime commodity of predatory financialisd capital

Masking utility

Neoliberalism (Moving away from the greatest happiness principle)

Complete disintegration of the disguise of the social

- Battle between oneself and the image of oneself – market of human relations

Understanding futility can be a starting point of something meaningful

Chapter 1. The Futilitarian Condition

Sees Bentham’s utilitarianism as easily constructed by those in power – as it

is fixed

- This has had a significant impact on economics and ethics – placing utility

maximisation at the heart of moral reasoning – looking at the actions rather

than the actor

- Even if some are hurt – and even if the utility only reveals itself down the line

– logic still used to justify rampant inequalities of Capitalism

- Steven Pinker (Psychologist) – progressive humanism - claims that we have

altogether improved as a society and meritocratic inequality is a natural part of

this progress.

- Utilitarianism has always sanctioned the accumulation of wealth/ as well as

colonial expansion

While utilitarianism ethically endorsed capitalism – this doesn’t imply the

opposite

When capitalism was failing – economic stagnation in the 1970s etc –

capitalism embraced individual autonomy – demanding utility

maximisation but without the greatest-happiness principle

o Sparking the futilitarian condition – where utility maximisation actively

worsens social conditions

The neoliberals one – with Hayek playing a particularly influential role

(heading the think tank that transformed Chile to a neoliberal economy)

Came also out of how the capitalists colonised the demands of the

anticapitalist left -

o Individuals forced to make themselves useful to survive

o Utility defined by employers, businesses and corporations

o Far from utilitarian in its effects

Neoliberalism and the futilitarian condition

Grants autonomy by making individual choice and flexibility the basis of

the market economy

o Merely creates the conditions for autonomy – irrespective of whether

greater autonomy makes individuals happy or not

o Contradiction between autonomy and freedom

o The fantasy of autonomy

o Capital is set free rather than the individuals – Marx

Critiques of futilitarianism – how good of a description is it

Really incapsulates the real futility of the modern world – inequalities – climate

change – etc

- But we return to individual acts of (non) resistance – swapping a plastic bag

for a tote bag etc

- While futility haunts our daily move

- As opposed to seeing the transition as nihilistic

- Futility as something common